What sets these ten establishments apart from this year’s
bazillion openings? The ability to take a timeless concept
and turn it on its head. To cook the dishes your parents grew
up on but make them your own. To serve the food you believe
in without compromise. To make anyone who stumbles into
your restaurant feel instantly welcome. Those are (just a few of)
the characteristics that blow us away year after year as we
scour the country in search of the Hot 10: our annual list of the
best new restaurants. Welcome to the most delicious, exciting,
and just plain fun places to eat in America right now.

Denver

2 – MAYDAN

San Francisco

America’s Best New Restaurants 2018

By Andrew Knowlton Edited by Julia Kramer

10 – CALL

Cambridge, MA

5 – NYUM BAI

3

3 – UGLY BABY

Portland, ME

Los Angeles

5

6

7 – CHE FICO

8

5 – NYUM BAI

7

3 – UGLY BABY

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

6 – NIMBLEFISH

1 – NONESUCH

10

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

7 – CHE FICO

HOT TEN

4 – FREEDMAN’S

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

3 – UGLY BABY

7 – CHE FICO

1 – NONESUCH

5 – NYUM BAI

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

HOT TEN

NO.

I fell for OKC. I dug the low-slung brick buildings and the neon signs advertising laundry services and dive bars. I loved the airy art-filled 21c Museum Hotel where I stayed. I saw the same creative energy I see in Houston or Nashville at a new spot called Bar Arbolada, which was bustling with cool kids sipping cucumber daiquiris and cans of rosé. There was a cultural and culinary buzz beginning to simmer. Could Nonesuch be the restaurant to put OKC, which as far as I could tell was still heavy on steaks and onion burgers, on the national dining map? I’d seen my share of ambitious, inexperienced chefs try to transform tradition-bound restaurant scenes and fail colossally. I had my doubts.

Salty buttermilk sorbet with sorrel juice

America’s best
new restaurant?

Nonesuch is challenging food for any city. The fact that these chefs have chosen to stay in OKC and not flee to a city like Austin, where many talented local chefs end up, makes it all the more impressive. Their job is to feed people, yes, but I get the sense that they really love changing people’s attitudes about food. “Some folks come in, cross their arms defensively, and want to hate everything,” Wolfe says. “And then halfway through the meal they are smiling and laughing with you and really loving it. That’s my favorite thing to witness.” When I asked Stringer about his motivation, he paused for a moment. “It’s the transformative power of it,” he said. “You serve a heart dish and a lot of folks roll their eyes or make a face. Then you look over ten minutes later, and they’ve eaten all of it, and they’re beaming. I like that food has that power over people. That’s why I cook.”

3 – UGLY BABY

Of course, you can cook some of the best, most compelling personal food on the planet using hyper-local and foraged ingredients and have an amazing story to back it all up, but if it’s not delicious, does it really matter? I’ve been to plenty of
well-known spots where the food looks incredible on the plate
but fizzles when you taste it. I was worried during my first trip that this would be the case with Nonesuch’s beautiful dishes—all Instagram glam, no boom. Then Wang arrived with a delicate mushroom crepe filled with mint, lovage, sorrel, and nasturtium and dusted with smoked wild chive powder. It was like eating your way through an ethereal herb garden. And then there was a rich and deeply flavored steak tartare piled on a sablé cracker. God knows I’ve had my fair share of steak tartare in 2018, but this one was made from the dry-aged meat of a dairy cow and cut into slightly larger chunks, resulting in a beefy flavor times ten. What these guys lacked in confidence and oratory skills (a few dishes were described in a head-down mumble by the chefs), they more than made up for in technique and taste. These kids could really cook.

Soft scramble tart with black garlic

Mint and basil biscotti with herbal tea

Chefs Colin Stringer, Paul Wang, and Jeremy Wolfe

I stumbled upon Nonesuch while swiping through Instagram
during one of those late-night sessions I do after my wife falls asleep. The food on its feed looked beautiful and artistic and progressive, the kind of dishes you might find in Copenhagen
or Tokyo or New York—but not necessarily the Great Plains.
I googled it. The results were meager. No big write-ups. No national press. And definitely no press release about it in my
in-box. I started to wonder whether my internal restaurant
radar was broken. How could something that seemed so compelling have so little buzz? Should I really book an out-
of-the-way plane trip to Oklahoma based off a few well-lit Instagram photos?

Nonesuch doesn’t have PR. As of press time it has only 5,000 Instagram followers. It has a small local fan base, many of
whom work with Nonesuch in some capacity. The chefs didn’t spend years working for Boulud or Keller, although Wang did intern at Noma in Copenhagen. And it has a guy who makes waffle sandwiches. Stay with me. In 2014, Stringer and Wolfe (along with Andon Whitehorn) ran a pop-up called Nani in a creaky 100-year-old Victorian house in OKC. Nani became
a local phenomenon, selling out months in advance—until the health department essentially shut it down for operating without
a license.

Custom-made ceramics from OKC-based Sage Eden Pottery

Tell me your names again?

One of Nani’s early guests was a guy named Todd Woodruff,
a local restaurateur who had a runaway hit called Waffle Champion (think waffles wrapped around chicken tenders, crispy leeks, and Tabasco honey). He fell for the gutsy cooking at Nani and the DIY vibe of the venture. “I wanted
to give them a new stage to keep doing what they love but also make a living doing it,” Woodruff told me. Eventually
he contacted Stringer, who put much of the Nani band back together. Nonesuch, the name of the new project, opened in OKC’s Midtown district on October 4, 2017.

There’s always a moment when it hits me. It’s usually
a single bite and, boom, I fall in love with a restaurant.

On my second visit to the restaurant, Stringer asked if I was interested in trying a new dish and, of course, I was game. It involved barely poached double-shucked English peas (to remove any bitterness), strawberry vinegar, and coriander flowers. All of that was sitting atop the silkiest, most perfect custard I’ve ever eaten. The dairy used to make the custard is what sold me. It was cow’s colostrum. The glossy description of colostrum: “When cows give birth in the spring, the immediate milk they give is extremely high in protein.” (That’s how Stringer put it on the Nonesuch Instagram. ) The real-life, deal-with-it description: bovine breast milk. I defy anyone who likes dairy not to fall for it. It was the most intensely flavored dairy-based dish I’d ever tasted. It was grassy and needed no gelatin, just a bit of heat, to create a custard. I had never tasted a dish like it. “We have the freedom to cook whatever we want. So I think it’s very easy for us to be like, what do we have to lose, let’s put it on the menu,” Stringer says.

All three chefs share a passion for Oklahoma ingredients. But the fact that everything is from in-state is not a narrative they want
to shove in people’s faces. To them it’s just what responsible chefs do in 2018. Of course, it’s easier to abide by that philosophy when you live in, say, California or even Washington, D.C. But
in a landlocked state like Oklahoma it can be difficult. The Nonesuch guys see these limitations as a positive. “I think it helps our creativity because if we could cook with anything we wanted, well, I’m not sure that we would know what to do,” Wolfe says.
This connection to place is part of what makes Nonesuch so special. Take the tea course that usually arrives near the end of the tasting menu, the one that most people overlook until they take a sip. It’s not fresh chamomile or even some rare pu-erh. It’s made with as many as 12 ingredients that the chefs have foraged over the years, which they steep in hot water. “Not only was it utterly delicious, but I remember thinking that I was drinking an entire year of Oklahoma,” Elwell recalls. “Every season. Every storm. Every drought. That still blows my mind.”

At the end of my visit, Stringer drove me around OKC on a 95 degree day in his blue 2001 Dodge Ram truck. The AC was busted and the humid air blew in the windows like a hair dryer. He pointed out local landmarks: the geodesic Gold Dome on Route 66, his favorite Chinese joint, Chow’s, and the old Victorian that housed Nani and started him on the road to Nonesuch, a restaurant whose future I openly worried about. Even more, I was worried about Stringer, Wang, and Wolfe. How demoralizing must it be to cook the wildly creative and compelling food they were knocking out nightly and still not be busy? How did they stay motivated? “Sometimes I do get frustrated and ask myself, ‘Why am I here at 8:30 a.m. when
I’m cooking for five people tonight?’” Stringer replied. “But we have to remind ourselves that we’ve gotta make it great every single day.” He paused as we drove by S&B’s, a local chain where he used to flip burgers. “None of this really makes any sense,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

Grilled chicken hearts?
Colostrum custard?
Are you kidding?

It was Thursday,
prime time, and the place
was all but empty.

2018

1 – NONESUCH

1 – NONESUCH

Time to sort the elderflowers

5 – NYUM BAI

5 – NYUM BAI

3 – UGLY BABY

7 – CHE FICO

How demoralizing must it
be to cook the wildly creative
and compelling food they
were knocking out nightly and
still not be busy?

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

HOT TEN

7 – CHE FICO

by

Ready to jump a flight to OKC? Read about the
Nonesuch crew’s favorite spots in town.

Thankfully, curiosity got the better of me. And six weeks later, as I stepped out into the sticky OKC air after that first dinner at Nonesuch, I was ecstatic and grateful. I was also full of questions: How did food this challenging materialize in a town known more for its massive chicken-fried steaks? Who was in the kitchen, and how did they learn how to cook like this? And in a world where everyone knows everything about a restaurant the minute it opens, how
had this place flown so under the radar? I had to find out.

America’s best
new restaurant?

Bison tartare on pork fat sablé

city of neon

The chefs acknowledge the lack of attention they’ve received, but it doesn’t change the way they operate. “It’s more respectful to a community if you’re not dumbing things down and making everything fried this or fried that,” Wolfe says. “You have to remember that our state dish is an extra side of ranch dressing.”

Nonesuch is not ambitious for OKC; it’s ambitious, period. The trio’s inspiration is modern Nordic cooking—a style of cuisine defined by hyper-local, often foraged ingredients, minimal but artful plating, and a love of all things fermented, pickled, and cured. What that means at Nonesuch is that if there’s a protein, vegetable, piece of fruit, or dairy product on the plate, it comes from Oklahoma. For some cooks this would mean culinary suicide, but for Stringer, Wang, and Wolfe, it is the whole reason for the restaurant’s existence.
Wang is super technical and can pickle and ferment anything—
skills he picked up during his Noma stint. Stringer has a way with aging and cooking meats and knows more than anyone should about vinegars, a key component in many Nonesuch dishes. He’s also the kitchen general. Wolfe, the baby of the bunch at 25, is a bread and dessert Jedi who made even this dessert skeptic a fan. I’m not alone. Greg Elwell, the former restaurant critic for the Oklahoma Gazette, told me about Wolfe’s crème anglaise s’more: “It was legit one of my top desserts of the last decade. I ate it with my eyes closed,” he remembers. “The woman I was with decided then and there
that nothing was going to happen between us, because who wants to date the guy who gets weird with food.”

HOT TEN

1

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after crisscrossing the country in search of memorable food for almost 20 years, it’s that greatness exists everywhere—it just needs risk-takers to make it happen. “I won’t pretend everyone here gets Nonesuch, but those guys have willed a Michelin-caliber restaurant into reality through passion,” explains Blair Humphreys, a local developer and Nonesuch regular. He’s right. All it takes is three people who believe in what they do and do it (well) with conviction. It also helps if you have someone who sells a lot of waffles to believe in you and back you.

ALEX LAU

Could Nonesuch be
the restaurant to put OKC,
which as far as I could
tell was still heavy on steaks
and onion burgers, on the
national dining map?

The best analogy I can
use to describe the trio is three
guys in a band, heads down,
making incredibly beautiful music together—that they doubt anyone will ever hear.

Welcome to Oklahoma City.

You down with OKC?

Grilled bison rib eye with grilled baby cabbage and peach glaze

4 – FREEDMAN’S

How did a 22-seat
tasting-menu spot from
three chefs whom
no one has ever heard
of, in a city that no
national critic has ever
paid attention to,
become

THE TASTING MENU

Nonesuch is not ambitious
for OKC; it’s ambitious, period.

Colin Stringer, Jeremy Wolfe, and Paul Wang are the chefs behind Nonesuch. All are under 30, and none have much in the way of professional culinary training. A month after my first meal, I was back in OKC, but this time I was sitting with the three chefs at Pho Cuong, their favorite Vietnamese restaurant. It’s where you can usually find them eating bún riêu and finishing one another’s sentences. Stringer, who was “really bad at college,” began his career washing dishes and scattering hash browns at Waffle House. Wolfe got his start at a restaurant where his buddy worked when the dishwasher quit. Unlike Stringer and Wolfe, both OKC natives, Wang was born in Hong Kong, then raised in Seoul and Southern California. His first job was at John’s Incredible Pizza Company, a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff, where he was a guest-service rep and wore a bear costume. After watching them work and eating their food, I think the best analogy I can use to describe the trio, who jokingly call themselves the Mayflower Boys after their shared birth month,
is three guys in a band, heads down, making incredibly beautiful music together—that they doubt anyone will ever hear.

This time it was a forkful of homemade dan dan noodles. They
were tossed with minced fermented turnip greens in a tahini-like pecan sauce, dressed with chili oil, dusted with cucumber powder, and garnished with micro purple basil. It was spicy
and cooling, confounding in its simplicity, and immensely satisfying—the type of dish that follows you around for years.
The taste was unexpected and complex. Whoever made it
was a genius.
I was halfway through a ten-course tasting menu in a 22-seat restaurant in a city I’d never set foot in before. It was Thursday, prime time, and the place was all but empty. Dried wild spinach and juniper hung from the wood rafters. Pickles and other jarred kitchen experiments lined the shelves. Car Seat Headrest played on the speakers. There was a host, a server, three chefs, and no menu. I was head over heels but utterly confused. Who cooked
this dish? And what the hell was this place?
It had been three months since I’d set off on my annual cross-country search for the year’s best new restaurants. I’d checked
out most of the places I was “supposed” to. You know, those
buzzy spots run by pedigreed chefs or by cooks who used
to work for those pedigreed chefs. I’d visited San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Chicago, and the other noted food cities. I’d
checked out the vibrant restaurant scenes in smaller towns
like Charleston, South Carolina, and Portland (both of them).
But Oklahoma City? In two decades of covering restaurants,
it had never popped onto my radar. And the chefs? Never
heard of them.

Turnip with duck-yolk sauce and kale “nori”

Blueberry sorbet with lemongrass yogurt

With signs like these, who wouldn’t
fall in love with OKC’s retro charm?

Did other diners realize just how astonishing these dishes were? I was beginning to think not. On the two evenings I dined at Nonesuch, there were a combined total of ten guests. Including me. It got me thinking. What did I see in Nonesuch that others did not? What was keeping people away? Was it the price (around $75 for ten courses)? Was it the in-your-face dishes like grilled chicken hearts or aged duck? Did people find the tasting-menu format pretentious? Did OKC locals even know Nonesuch existed? When I got back to my hotel after that first thrilling dinner, I flipped through the local city magazine’s Best Of issue. Nonesuch wasn’t mentioned anywhere. The magazine’s favorite new restaurant was praised for its cozy environment and large portions. “What more could we want?” the last sentence read. Elwell told me about the time he was having dinner with a member of the OKC city council, and when he mentioned Nonesuch, the city official had never heard of the place.

The scene at Bar Arbolada

A round at Prairie Artisan Ales

All it takes is three
people who believe in what
they do and do it (well)
with conviction. It also helps
if you have someone who sells
a lot of waffles to believe
in you and back you.

4 – FREEDMAN’S

Compressed courgette and fava–stuffed squash blossom

2 – MAYDAN

2 – MAYDAN

Colostrum custard with peas

6 – NIMBLEFISH

6 – NIMBLEFISH

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

In the food-media world we tend to cover the same spots. There’s a well-traveled circuit of usual-suspect cities. Each year certain restaurants pop up on everyone’s Best Of lists. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. If a place is great, it’s great, right? Take last year’s No. 1 restaurant on our list, Turkey and
the Wolf in New Orleans. We loved it. And so did everyone else. Yes, it was a sandwich place, a bold choice to name the best restaurant in America, but it was in one of the most food-obsessed cities in America. The chef, Mason Hereford, had worked at a standout NOLA spot, and there were already
lines out the door by the time I checked it out. Nonesuch had none of that going for it.

10 – CALL

10 – CALL

HOT TEN

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

ANDREW KNOWLTON

Swiss Chard-Tahini Dip

NO.

I discovered the word in Ukraine.

Slow-Roast Spiced Lamb Shoulder with Sumac Onions

A giant hearth with a copper hood sits at the center
of Maydan, which is housed in a former train facility.

Maydan owner Rose Previte

7 – CHE FICO

MICHAEL GRAYDON + NIKOLE HERRIOTT

Seared Halloumi
with Peanut Dukkah and Honey

Get the recipe

Get the recipe

Andy Baraghani

2

5 – NYUM BAI

Photographs by

2018

5 – NYUM BAI

HOT TEN

7 – CHE FICO

1 – NONESUCH

Get the recipe

3 – UGLY BABY

Cinnamon-Tomato Jam

At Maydan the lamb shoulder is cooked sous vide until meltingly tender and then finished in the hearth until crisp and golden brown. We adapted their recipe for the oven to similar effect.

Freekeh Salad
with Parsley and Cherry Tomatoes

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

Lemony Cabbage
with Mint

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

We want you to taste the food, to taste the vegetables just as they are. There’s fire on them, but the flavor of the white oak wood is not the component we want coming through. It’s not barbecue; it’s grilled. We don’t smoke anything. We could if
we wanted to, but it wouldn’t be accurate for the regions we
are representing. There’s not a lot of fusion, there’s not a lot of experimentation. It’s really dead-on.
Certain things don’t work on the fire, like rice. People are
always asking, “Why isn’t there rice with my kebab?” We’re
like, “We can’t do rice!”
What we can do is bread. It’s the most representative thing on
the menu. In Georgia I discovered this clay-pot oven, known
as a tone, that made it all the way there from India. We’ve built
one into our hearth here at Maydan. We make a flatbread using recipes from all the cultures put together. It’s not naan, it’s not pita—our bread is unique; nobody else does it like we do. To me it’s the culmination. It’s symbolic, the breaking of bread, in this place where people can come together as equals.

1 – NONESUCH

3 – UGLY BABY

RECIPES

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MAYDAN

If you love hummus
or baba ghanoush,
this dairy-free dip
will become a new favorite. Just make
sure you have plenty
of warm flatbread to scoop it all up.

maydan

Maydan’s signature flatbread

Reported by

When all the flavors meld, the dried mint blooms and transforms this dish into an addictive slaw that pairs well with fatty cuts of meat.

6 – NIMBLEFISH

Get the recipe

My mom is Lebanese-American, my dad is Italian-American, and I have been cooking and surrounded by food since I was born. My first restaurant, Compass Rose, is all about international street food. But for the second, I wanted a fire. All of those squares, those maydans, have fire. I wanted the restaurant to give you that feeling of winding through a market, like you’re in the medina in Fez, Morocco. It’s a little chaotic, but it’s happy chaos.
So I linked up with Chris Morgan and Gerald Addison, my
co-executive chefs, who’ve both worked extensively with fire cooking. As we were talking, we realized we had a love for Middle Eastern food above all else. This led to a five-country
trip, which started in Morocco, went on to Tunisia, then Georgia, Lebanon, and Turkey.
You come into the restaurant, and it’s really quiet, and you’re just
in the vestibule covered with textiles. It feels a little like Alice in Wonderland. There are steps and doors and you’re like, Which way do I go? But then you open the main door, and there it is:
the hearth. And you instantly feel something: surprise, shock, horror, happiness—it doesn’t matter, you feel something. It’s an experience. Everything in the restaurant is meaningful. Everything has a story.
There’s no stove, no range. Everything is cooked on the hearth, which has a mammoth hood covered in copper. The fire is so big and so intense that these guys are sweating through their shirts
in five minutes. I don’t think we want it to be tamed; it’s just about managing it. There is something primal in the fire. The way people are drawn to it is insane. They just stare for hours. It’s like installation art.

4 – FREEDMAN’S

HOT TEN

It took a trip halfway around the world to design the
live-fire hearth at the center of this Middle Eastern restaurant.
But it takes only one meal—and a couple hours staring longingly
at the huge hearth and all the charred meats and puffy
bread coming off it—to realize why it was so worth it. Owner
Rose Previte tells the story of how it all got started

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

Cinnamon lends additional sweetness to this savory jam, making it an excellent match with heavily spiced lamb or pork.

2 – MAYDAN

I kept hearing it: “Everyone is meeting at maydan,” and “The revolution is happening at maydan.” I found out this word is used throughout the Caucuses, Iran, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and India. And it always means the same thing: a central public meeting place. A space for people to come together as a community, to mourn, to celebrate, to rebel. People in these places have drastic income disparities, but there’s always street food that everybody loves and that’s representative of the culture. The poor people eat there and the rich people eat there. It’s an equalizer. A maydan brings everyone together over a common emotion. And that is powerful.

10 – CALL

—ROSE PREVITE

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

Get the recipe

The chefs at Maydan make this summer grain salad extra tart with
lots of lemon juice. It can be served on its own
or alongside creamy spreads or fatty pieces
of meat.

4 – FREEDMAN’S

Get the recipe

Salty, lacy-edged Halloumi covered in
warm honey and sprinkled with nutty dukkah—what’s
not to love?

2 – MAYDAN

6 – NIMBLEFISH

10 – CALL

HOT TEN

6

When All Else Fails, Eat a Cucumber

5 – NYUM BAI

A Mortar and Pestle Takes Time, and That’s the Point

Hot tips

7 – CHE FICO

Ingredients for red curry paste

Born and raised in Bangkok, Sreparplarn learned to cook from his parents. “As a Thai kid you are always in the kitchen,” he says. His father would spend hours at home pounding curry paste, and his mother worked as a chef at a hotel. “My mom
was the one who taught me to never stop learning,” he recalls. “That’s why I always question myself, like, is this good enough? Am I in a comfort zone already? I have to dare to do more.”

4

Chef Sirichai Sreparplarn

and

Sirichai Sreparplarn (back row center in orange hat) with his staff, who coordinate their colorful costumes every Saturday
(this was Bowie night)

“Not only is the heat from different chiles
different, but each ingredient in a dish— cumin,
pepper, garlic, turmeric, galangal—complements
the spiciness and adds flavor little by little.
When they are combined, it’s like a bomb.”

“It’s my belief that curry
paste is the key to Thai cooking.
It is the base of almost all my dishes. Thai cooking has
adopted so many methods from so many different cuisines
from China, from Myanmar, from Thai Muslims, today from Koreans, from the Japanese. But the key to Thai cuisine, if we strip all that off, is the paste. That is
the real Thailand to me.”

ALEX LAU

BROOKLYN

1 – NONESUCH

HOT TEN

7 – CHE FICO

3 – UGLY BABY

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

5 – NYUM BAI

At 28, Sreparplarn moved to New York City to study journalism and help his aunt with her Thai restaurant in the East Village.
Later he helped lead the kitchen at the short-lived but critically acclaimed Kao Soy in Red Hook, then a pop-up down the
street called Chiang Mai. His goal from the start has been to introduce New Yorkers to what he calls “real Thai cooking.”
“Thai food is not about doing it fast,” he says. “It’s about low heat and spending time stirring and stirring, sometimes for hours.”
The process of opening his own restaurant wasn’t easy; the chef spent a year searching for a space and looking for a loan. When he finally succeeded, he named the place Ugly Baby after an old Thai superstition: calling newborns unattractive so that the evil spirits will leave them alone. “This restaurant is my ugly baby,” says Sreparplarn. “It’s everything to me, but I’m always afraid
I’m going to lose it.”

GET THE RECIPE

HILARY CADIGAN chris morocco

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

3

3 – UGLY BABY

“Thai food is about cooking
with patience. My best memory of my dad cooking is him
pounding curry paste because nobody else could make it
the way he wanted. He pounded all day, for hours and hours. Here at Ugly Baby, we make our curry paste the way my dad did: with a mortar and pestle.”

2018

Tum kanoon (red curry with jackfruit)

1 – NONESUCH

“When someone is
struggling with the heat, we give them a fresh chilled cucumber. Warm water, beer, and milk help too.”

5

Bird Chiles Are the Only
Fresh Chiles That Matter

Kua kling (beef eye round curry)

Making curry paste with a mortar and pestle

3

Tu ka ko (fried coconut milk cakes)

Fresh bird chiles

The hottest restaurant in New York? It’s quite
literally the hottest. The chef, Sirichai Sreparplarn,
is a chile whisperer who doesn’t care if you can’t
stand the heat. And the food he cooks is habit-forming:
You’ll crave the fiery but purposeful heat of his
Technicolor Thai dishes

“Thai food stands out because of how generous we are with flavor. I don’t hold
back. If it’s too spicy, add more sugar. If
it’s too sweet, add more fish sauce or chile. Cool, crunchy herbs and veggies balance heat. It’s never a matter of too much flavor;
it’s about adding more to balance everything.”

How Ugly Baby chef Sirichai Sreparplarn handles the heat

6 – NIMBLEFISH

Curry Paste
Is the Foundation of Everything

Seats fill up the moment Ugly Baby opens every night.

More Is More

4 – FREEDMAN’S

Photographs by

NO.

“We use bird chiles because we follow the
rules of the great-grandmothers and -grandfathers.
We already know what is good. I don’t see
anything that can replace them. Fresh, ripe red Thai
bird chiles release the best aroma and flavor. We
also sometimes use the bigger cayenne chile pepper
for texture and color but not really for flavor.”

Heat and Flavor
Go Hand in Hand

“The only way
to tone down the heat is to dilute it,” the chef says, “which I refuse to do.” Walk into Ugly Baby on a Saturday night and you’ll find the tiny Brooklyn restaurant packed with diners sweating and crying (literally) from the profusion of chiles found in each dish. But the atmosphere is pure fun. “I believe heat is like a drug,” Sreparplarn says with a sly smile. “It’s painful, but you want more, more, more.”

HOT TEN

2

2 – MAYDAN

UGLY BABY

10 – CALL

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

Reported by

1

Sirichai Sreparplarn doesn’t compromise.

4 – FREEDMAN’S

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

2 – MAYDAN

6 – NIMBLEFISH

10 – CALL

HOT TEN

NO.

THE BRISKET

1 – NONESUCH

“The pickles are made in-house, the sauerkraut
is made in-house, the pumpernickel bread for
the happy hour toast is made in-house. All the bagels are hand rolled and made in-house.”

THE BATHROOM

3 – UGLY BABY

There’s a story behind every plate, pickle, and pipe
(yes, pipe) at Freedman’s. Jonah Freedman tells us a few of them

THE BAR

Because we’re
not really a deli. We don’t do stuff by the pound, we have
liquor, and we’re open a little later. Other modern delis
have popped up, but a lot of them were just changing the
deli aesthetic, going light and bright—minimalist design with subway tile. They weren’t looking at the food and saying,
“Where can we innovate? Where can we bring this idea of Jewish food to another level?” That’s where we got excited.
We didn’t want the food to become sentimental or nostalgic.
I grew up going to delis with my grandfather in Toronto. Sour pickles are staples of Jewish cooking, but I find them boring.
Thus, the half-sour salad was born. It’s avocado, fennel, and green goddess dressing. Our latkes are done in a waffle
iron. Our brisket is served with bone marrow—which just
pushes it in a more French direction. We have a lot of French customers, actually. I think it’s because they realize that we’re secretly a French restaurant masquerading as a Jewish deli.

.

THE ELECTRIC KNIFE

We’re the black sheep of Jewish delis.

floral wallpaper

CO-OWNER JONAH FREEDMAN

“We hired Liz Johnson as our opening chef. We were like, Hey, you’re super non-Jewish, and
we’re going to have you make briskets and Reubens. We swap the traditional corned beef for our pastrami, which is brined and smoked in-house.”

IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS

There’s a culture of delis in L.A. In the summer of 2016 I was
at Langer’s with my sister. We were sitting there, looking
around, realizing that this place was about to close and it
was four o’clock in the afternoon. We said to each other,
“What if this place were a little younger, a little cooler, had
some great music playing, and a menu geared toward a
more modern customer? And what if we could access it at
ten o’clock at night? What would that look like?” And that’s
kind of where everything started from.
The brass, the French sconces from 1910 Paris, the Morris &
Co. wallpaper, the tank on the toilet that’s decorated with
24-karat gold-leaf trim…it’s a little f*#% you to restaurants
that were clean and spare with pure white walls. I wanted to
fill everything. Our bar is made from an old hearth we found.
A local tattoo artist, Aron Dubois, did our logo. Our napkins have an illustration of a flamingo drinking a martini; it’s a
little bit Miami. The idea is: Okay, what if young people took
over a grandma’s house and made it cool?

THE LATKES

5 – NYUM BAI

HOT TEN

7 – CHE FICO

3 – UGLY BABY

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

5 – NYUM BAI

1 – NONESUCH

HOT TEN

Strawberry Thief

Morris & Co. print called Compton.

THE ROTARY TELEPHONE

The Bathroom

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

7 – CHE FICO

MICKEY RAPKIN

Cole & Son print called Miami

The Hallway

—JONAH FREEDMAN

The Banquettes

THE MATZO BALLS

The Bar

The Dividing Wall

“Rather than selecting one single wallpaper to cover the entire restaurant, the aim was to create different spaces and dining experiences with each new wall,” says Freedman. For example:

“We have wicker chairs and Modernica chairs; we’re mixing different eras throughout the restaurant. Because your grandparents, as they go through time, they collect things. And all of these eras exist at once.”

THE REUBEN

LOS ANGELES

Photographs by

“The color, the light stitching of the leather—
it’s inspired by Hermès watches. We had them custom made.”

THE BANQUETTES

Genius is when you take a timeless concept, turn it on
its head, and redefine it. That’s what sibling restaurateurs
Jonah and Amanda Freedman have done for the classic
Jewish deli: They improved an already perfect thing. Here,
Jonah breaks down every careful detail, from the latkes
to the lavatory

THE PICKLES

Morris & Co. wallpaper called

“This is our super-strange version of high-low. The brisket is sliced tableside, but it’s not a particularly nice cut of meat. Not only that, but it’s cut with our ‘dad knife,’ which is just a battery-operated Waring.”

“Our brisket is done like Jewish-Texas
barbecue, with loads of tarragon on top,
braised for hours. You get rye bread, you
get pickles, and the idea is that you create
this massive sandwich out of everything.”

.

4

“Delis were a place to sit and talk. That’s a
huge part of our bar. It’s made from an old
1940s fireplace mantel that we found in L.A.
I know it’s cheesy and everyone talks about
the hearth, but that’s where people meet.”

4 – FREEDMAN’S

IF THESE WALLPAPERS COULD TALK...

“The porcelain is hand-painted in 24-karat
gold-leaf trim. As for the gold plumbing
on the urinal, that was incredibly hard to get
our hands on. That was deep web.”

2 – MAYDAN

“We shred the potatoes, put them in the waffle iron, freeze them, then fry them. The outside gets crispy and renders the inside soft and mashed potato-y. It’s like molten chocolate cake.”

ALEX LAU

“The wall opposite the bathrooms is left blank. This is meant to kind of clear your visual palette for the moment before you enter the bathroom and see the amazing
It’s vibrant, fun, confusing. It’s like Boca Raton meets M.C. Escher.”

“The wall that separates the kitchen from
the dining room is clad in
. This took double the time
to install than all the newly manufactured wallpaper did. It was like trying to put up newspaper. It was thin and delicate and
had to be done with a very gentle hand.
The background is a kind of burgundy color, and the flowers are grayish-white, which play off the marble counter below.”

THE CHAIRS

The bar area is filled with richer,
darker tones: browns and burnt orange.
It feels a little more like a speakeasy: dimmer, boozier. The wallpaper used along the bar to create that kind of Prohibition-esque atmosphere is a

“We wanted them superlight and airy. I think
[former L.A. Times critic] Jonathan Gold called them quenelles. Rather than one hulking thing, there’s
a dozen or so. It’s a nicer, more palatable soup experience. We serve them in Luminarc Amberline cookware we found in Koreatown.”

“The wallpaper along the banquet is a
It seemed like a nice everyday wallpaper: not too dark, but had enough patterning to feel cozy and intimate at night, like a well-worn British country home. The many browns, tans, and oranges play off the saddle-like cognac leather cushions.”

FREEDMAN’S

“Reinforcing the bird theme that’s
present through the restaurant, we selected the
. It depicts perched birds
with strawberries in their mouths. It’s a relatively light scene but has dark greens and browns that complement the dark green wainscoting below. The color scheme seems kind of country club to me.”

Morris & Co. print called Golden Lily

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

10 – CALL

“It has a dial tone. The idea is, if you don’t have
your phone, you can make a call. Similar to Cheers,
you can receive a call at the bar. I would love if
one of the employees answered the phone and went into the dining room and called out to someone.
It’ll happen one day.”

6 – NIMBLEFISH

1940s deadstock

Reported by

2018

2 – MAYDAN

6 – NIMBLEFISH

10 – CALL

4 – FREEDMAN’S

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

HOT TEN

Things may get messy, but Nyum Bai is prepared.

2 – MAYDAN

10 – CALL

6 – NIMBLEFISH

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

and my brothers on weekends. There are three
main parts: rich broth, rice noodles, and meat toppings. Then the garnishes: crispy garlic, black pepper, cilantro, green onions, and lime. When
I was in Phnom Penh, I started my mornings eating
it at my favorite noodle stall. That’s where I had
my epiphany. Halfway through eating the soup,
I started thinking, Oh my gosh, this is so good, but
no one in America knows about it. If people know anything about Cambodia, it’s the genocide. But in Phnom Penh life was just happening all around me. People had moved on from the war; they were living, celebrating, having a good time. Cambodia has such a rich and beautiful history. And I thought people needed to know more about Cambodian food because it is so damn good.

1 – NONESUCH

HOT TEN

THE PORK CHOP THAT
BRINGS BACK A GOLDEN ERA

2 – MAYDAN

THE FISH-PASTE-FILLED DIP
THAT TASTES (AND SMELLS!)
LIKE MY CHILDHOOD

a compilation of Khmer rock music from the ’60s and ’70s, curated and remastered by Rattanak Oudam of the Cambodian Vintage Music Archive. Listen to more recordings from Cambodia’s golden age of rock and roll:

4 – FREEDMAN’S

months and then to Stockton, California, where there was a bigger Cambodian community.
We lived in an apartment complex with a lot of other Cambodian families, but we kind of stayed
to ourselves.
My parents don’t talk much about Cambodia;
the memories are just too painful. But the time they talk about most is the carefree ’60s and early ’70s, the golden era, when Cambodia was a happening country and all of the artists and the musicians would go to Phnom Penh to make music, to be part of the scene.
All that was taken away from them by the regime. I wanted to bring that back—the scene, the music, the color palette, even the name Nyum Bai (which means “eat rice”). I wanted to have my parents’ generation and the younger generations celebrate this time and hopefully heal as well.

a glimpse Inside Nyum bai

7 – CHE FICO

To make prahok ktiss, she would stir-fry the paste with pork belly and let it simmer so the fat would incorporate with all the other flavors and create
this thick creamy dip for raw veggies. It’s time-consuming, so my mom would make it only for special occasions: birthdays, celebrations, temple visits. I was hesitant to put this on the menu at first because it was so different and weird, but all the customers who have tried it have come back just
to order it.

HOT TEN

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

5 – NYUM BAI

1 – NONESUCH

7 – CHE FICO

3 – UGLY BABY

2018

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

OAKLAND

3 – UGLY BABY

4 – FREEDMAN’S

NO.

5 – NYUM BAI

Nyum Bai’s tables are laden with condiments like sugar and
chili sauce for adding extra flavor—if you need it.

6 – NIMBLEFISH

GET THE SOUNDTRACK

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

10 – CALL

Reported by

Diners flock from near and far to eat at Nyum Bai, located in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.

1 – NONESUCH

1 – NONESUCH

Nyum Bai chef-owner Nite Yun

I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after
my parents fled the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s. I was two years old when I came to the States. But even though I had never been to Cambodia, I was still connected to the country because of the stories I heard growing up.
I always had this longing to go—well, I want
to say go “back” to Cambodia since it felt so familiar to me. The first time I went back, I had just dropped out of nursing school after realizing it wasn’t for me. I was 23 or 24. It was so trippy. Everywhere I went I was like, Wow, these are all the foods I grew up eating.
This noodle soup dish, listed on the menu as kuy teav Phnom Penh, is what inspired me to start Nyum Bai. It’s the soup my mom would prepare for me

CAMBODIA VIA CALIFORNIA

The restaurant’s walls are lined with vintage record covers from Cambodia’s golden age of rock and roll.

This simple marinated pork chop with rice, bai sach chrouk, reminds me of my childhood. My mom would marinate the pork overnight in coconut milk, soy sauce, and garlic, and then my brothers and
I would come home from school, pan-fry it ourselves, and eat it with rice. If we wanted, we could put an egg on top. As far as I can remember, back to five or six years old, I was always in the kitchen with my mom. I didn’t realize I was learning how to cook, but I helped her cut vegetables or pound lemongrass because I really didn’t have anywhere to go.
Growing up, we were isolated from the community. I think my parents were just shocked when they arrived in America. They didn’t know what to do; they didn’t speak the language. It was very difficult for them to assimilate. After the refugee camp in Thailand, we moved to Texas for a few

3 – UGLY BABY

–NITE YUN

Photographs by

THE NOODLE SOUP
THAT STARTED IT ALL

When I was young, my house always smelled
like prahok, a really flavorful fermented fish paste
that’s the base for a lot of classic Cambodian dishes. But I was so used to it that I didn’t know
until people would come over and be like, “Damn, your house really smells.” My mom would take the fermented fish and chop it up with a cleaver until
it was really minced. I remember the smell of cutting lemongrass, mixing it in with the garlic and shallots and lime leaves.

5

HILARY CADIGAN

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

5 – NYUM BAI

Nyum Bai started as a pop-up but opened a brick-and-mortar location in February 2018.

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

6 – NIMBLEFISH

—ROSE PREVITE

The best tracks we heard all year were on the Nyum Bai playlist,

NYUM BAI

ALEX LAU

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

7 – CHE FICO

5 – NYUM BAI

HOT TEN

4 – FREEDMAN’S

3 – UGLY BABY

10 – CALL

2 – MAYDAN

At her deeply personal restaurant in the East Bay, Nite Yun reimagines the Cambodian food of her childhood, from soulful bowls of Cambodian noodle soup to flavorful marinated pork chops, all set to a psychedelic Khmer playlist. Here are three dishes that transport Yun back in time

7 – CHE FICO

HOT TEN

2 – MAYDAN

6 – NIMBLEFISH

10 – CALL

4 – FREEDMAN’S

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

HOT TEN

“We do a salt and sugar cure on the salmon, then we put it through a session in a smoker with applewood burning at
175 degrees for five minutes. We’ll chill it, do another five-minute session, then cool it once more. We’ll serve it a little colder than room temperature.”

TREVALLY JACK MACKEREL

SHIMA-AJI

SCALLOP

ATLANTIC SALMON

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

Auger slices through yet another gleaming piece of fish.

NO.

SOY-MARINATED TUNA

“Gizzard shad is one of the
oldest sushi being made today
in the Edomae style of sushi
(a 200-year-old tradition of curing or cooking fish before serving).
The shad is heavily salted for
30 minutes, then rinsed with vinegar, then rested in a vinegar marinade for another 30 minutes.”

OCTOPUS

“This is a sustainably farmed Atlantic salmon from Victoria, B.C. Because we want the sourcing to really shine, we keep the preparation minimal. We’ll only do a traditional 30-minute salt-and-vinegar cure on the salmon. We’ll dress it with a finishing clump of grated daikon.”

“This fish is fairly rare to see
in the wild. Most restaurants source theirs from year-round aquaculture farms in Japan, but we prefer ours wild-caught and in-season. We wash it with salt and top it with grated ginger.”

MAGURO ZUKE

OREGON DUNGENESS CRAB

SHORT-SPINED SEA URCHIN

“We heavily salt the fish’s skin and use a torch to heat the salt, which solidifies and cooks the skin. Afterward, we drop the fish into an ice bath and the salt falls off. We do this to preserve a layer of fat between the skin and the flesh. That fat adds a major boost to the flavor.”

7 – CHE FICO

“Fuefuki-dai is a really
prized shiromi, or whitefish: It’s one of the nicest whitefish you can possibly get. We lightly salt everything on the skin side and let it sweat a little bit. By pulling out the water, we’re also concentrating the flavor. We’ll age the fish for eight to ten days, serve it cool, and top it with wasabi.”

HOT TEN

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

5 – NYUM BAI

1 – NONESUCH

7 – CHE FICO

More scenes from Nimblefish

STAR SNAPPER

Chef Cody Auger preps short-grain Calrose rice for service in a hangiri, a rounded, flat-bottomed wooden tub used for rice-making.

3 – UGLY BABY

“Scallops will always be better
the fresher and better quality
you can get. We source scallops from Hokkaido, Japan, through
a relationship I built with a fish purveyor while working at
previous restaurants.”

ALEX LAU

5 – NYUM BAI

“The menu starts with freshly boiled octopus from a market in Fukuoka, Japan, which we wrap in nori and serve atop vinegar-washed Calrose rice. Our rice is a little bit saltier and more robust in flavor, so we don’t have to rely on too many condiments for seasoning the fish.”

2018

Portland, OR

1 – NONESUCH

3 – UGLY BABY

Jesse Sparks

ROLLED OMELET

YELLOW-STRIPED BUTTERFISH

FUEFUKI-DAI

SAKE

TAKABE

“This is a very classic
Edomae preservation of tuna. We cook the outside of the
fish with hot water and marinate it in a soy-based marinade for 20 to 30 minutes. It will continue to marinate after we pull it out, so we don’t want to do it for too long.”

“We get a live, local Dungeness crab. We boil it, clean it, and shell it, then we take the crab innards, or the kani-miso, and toss that in with the crabmeat. We wrap all of that meat in nori and serve it.”

HOTATE

“People are falling in love
with uni all over, not just in sushi. Like most sushi, the secret to uni lies in who your source is. I have a great source for this in Japan. We wrap it in nori and serve it. The result is a briny piece of sushi that ends very sweet.”

GIZZARD SHAD

SMOKED KING SALMON

NIMBLEFISH

Want a chance to watch Auger’s agile knifework in action?
The bar seats are the best in the house.

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

BAFUN UNI

KANI

SMOKED SAKE

6 – NIMBLEFISH

TAKO

Photographs by

Reported by

2 – MAYDAN

6

Impeccably sourced fish, perfectly seasoned rice, and
relentless attention to detail define every bite at this
transcendent sushi bar. Chef Cody Auger takes us through
a few pieces of his ethereal Edomae-style sushi

HOT TEN

TAMAGO

4 – FREEDMAN’S

“An egg crepe with a bunch of dashi that’s been folded and flipped a number of times is a super-traditional piece of sushi eaten at the end of the meal. It takes us about 45 minutes per day to make the omelets.”

10 – CALL

2 – MAYDAN

Hanging at the table before the sushi arrives at Nimblefish, a joint collaboration of chefs Cody Auger and Dwight Rosendahl and wine guru Kurt Heilemann.

Does America need another Italian restaurant? If that restaurant
is Che Fico, the answer is a definitive yes. From practically the moment it opened, this place has been humming like a restaurant
in its second decade. Every employee wears a smile, the servers know the menu back to front, and the exacting chefs have mastered pizza, pasta, and the world’s most flawless rustic desserts

CHE FICO

“This dough is almost 50 percent butter. We try to be really hands-off when rolling it to keep it extra flaky. The citrus version came out of desperation, to be honest. It was January, and there was really nothing else to use, so I thought, Heck, let’s try baking grapefruit and see what happens. I loved it.”

7 – CHE FICO

Pastry powerhouse Angela Pinkerton

7

Photographs by

—David Nayfeld, chef

Spaghetti
with Lobster Pomodoro

Julia kramer chris morocco

Reported by

5 – NYUM BAI

—Ben jackson, CHEF

2018

5 – NYUM BAI

HOT TEN

7 – CHE FICO

1 – NONESUCH

GET THE RECIPE

3 – UGLY BABY

SAN FRANCISCO

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

Chocolate
Budino with Candied
Walnuts

1 – NONESUCH

—Angela Pinkerton,
pastry chef

3 – UGLY BABY

Of course the charcuterie is cured in-house.

Wood-fired pies fresh from the oven

ALEX LAU

Grapefruit- Orange
Crostatas

and

GET THE RECIPE

JD Herrera rolls out sheets of pasta using a mattarello (rolling pin)
for Che Fico’s handmade tagliatelle and pappardelle.

6 – NIMBLEFISH

—Angela Pinkerton,
pastry chef

Che Fico
Chopped Salad

“Probably 75 percent of Italian restaurants in America have a chocolate budino on the menu. I wanted to make ours really silky and smooth, so I use a little less egg and
I add some very grassy olive oil for richness. I like a savory touch in the sweet dishes, so I dust the candied walnuts with salt.”

4 – FREEDMAN’S

HOT TEN

—David Nayfeld, chef

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

2 – MAYDAN

GET THE RECIPE

10 – CALL

GET THE RECIPE

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

“I wanted to do a chopped salad,
but I asked myself, How does this work
with the ethos of our restaurant? My
idea was: Keep the essence of the chopped salad—the chickpeas, the salami, the cheese, the dressing—but have everything else rotate around whatever’s growing locally.”

4 – FREEDMAN’S

“I put a version of this dish—with nduja that we make in-house—on the menu, and it was my favorite pasta, but I think people were scared of ordering it because of the word nduja. So I looked at one of my sous-chefs, and I was like, I’ll put lobster on it.
The next day we sold 40 of them. It’s now one of our signature dishes.”

2 – MAYDAN

6 – NIMBLEFISH

10 – CALL

HOT TEN

NO.

Thinly sliced rib eye, similar to shabu-shabu, is simmered in a bit of soy sauce, water, and sugar. Then the beefy cooking liquid is reduced and the beef is dunked into it a second time to reheat before going on top of the cold noodles.

Elizabeth Cecil

Grated Daikon

Nori

Beef

Nishioka thinks
about his udon in layers, and this cooling pile
of grated daikon complements the fishy broth, meaty beef,
and bracing scallion
and lemon to make
the perfect bowl.

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

Behind a small, spare counter hidden in a college food
court, Tsuyoshi Nishioka prepares a single dish: the best niku (beef) udon you’ll ever eat, made with the silkiest noodles you’ll ever slurp. Here’s what goes into this profound bowl

1 – NONESUCH

Noodles

Lead cook Tomohiro Shinoda examines each strand carefully.
He hopes to open his own noodle shop in Seattle some day.

“When I first opened my ramen shop, Yume Wo Katare,

2018

Scallions

Lemon

CAMBRIDGE, MA

7 – CHE FICO

HOT TEN

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

3 – UGLY BABY

Once I got back, I considered closing Yume Wo Katare temporarily one summer and starting an udon shop. I love udon that much. If I want to eat something else, I’ll just stop making
it and move on. I only serve what I want to eat. Then I found this space—and got a $35,000 udon noodle-making machine straight from Japan. It’s the same one I used at Setouchi Seimen.
Whenever I make udon, I get this feeling, like when you find the person you like. It’s hard to say, but it just gives me goose bumps. Every day I eat about four bowls of niku udon. Minimum. I’m always thinking about how to create the best tasting version. And every day it gets better, so I never get tired of it.”

5 – NYUM BAI

Photographs by

7 – CHE FICO

THE PERFECT BOWL

it was because that was the only thing I craved. Then I went
to Setouchi Seimen in Osaka, one of the more famous udon restaurants in Japan, and that really changed it for me. I only wanted to eat udon. Specifically niku [beef] udon.
Udon is very simple—flour, water, and salt—but it requires so much technique and talent to make so that the noodle isn’t too hard or too soft. It should be bouncy. A few years ago, I asked the owner of Setouchi Seimen to teach me. I worked from early morning to late at night, mixing the dough, stomping it with my feet to flatten it out, and then stretching and pressing it to make
it smoother.

Come right when the restaurant opens and you’ll get a glimpse of Nishioka churning out noodles with a $35,000 machine from Japan. He’s constantly tweaking the dough to mimic the one
at Setouchi Seimen in Osaka. Right now it’s made with Australian udon flour, Japanese
sea salt, and local Cambridge tap water, which, once softened, is similar to Japan’s supply.

5 – NYUM BAI

It’s not easy to find this classroom-like setup inside Lesley University, but Nishioka has developed
a loyal following of college students, local families, and noodle obsessives.

Squeeze it over the beef, Nishioka instructs,
to balance out the savoriness of the meat with some acidity.

Reported by

Lemon

Scallions

Noodles

Broth

YUME GA ARUKARA

Grated Daikon

Chef Tsuyoshi Nishioka breaks down his unforgettable niku udon

6 – NIMBLEFISH

Nishioka scatters crisp slivers of nori over the bowl; they cling to the noodles and balance
out the soy-slicked meat.

4 – FREEDMAN’S

Beef

2 – MAYDAN

The secret to this
umami-rich chilled broth? Two types of bonito flakes—katsuobushi (skipjack) and sababushi (mackerel).

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

6 – NIMBLEFISH

—Tsuyoshi Nishioka

4 – FREEDMAN’S

10 – CALL

HOT TEN

NO.

Molly baz elyse inamine

After a winter renovation by local wood shop Joiya Studios, the Hales and Jacksons debut the new Drifters Wife. It houses both the wine shop, located at the entrance and sectioned off by black-paneled walls, and the new restaurant, with 60 seats, a bottle list in addition to the by-the-glass one, a six-burner range with a convection oven, a real walk-in fridge, and a Spanish-style plancha for Ben to experiment with. But he still uses the old induction burners, and the team works the same: Ben cooks whatever he
likes and the Hales pour whatever they like.

Ben conjures up a new menu every
day at Drifters Wife based on what he gets from his farmers and what won’t fit in his fridge (though the crisp-skinned half chicken shows up on the menu most nights). And the Hales change the by-the-glass list nearly as often. Their landlord offers them the vacant restaurant next door to the shop and construction begins on Drifters Wife 2.0.

1 – NONESUCH

ELIZABETH CECIL

August 2018

3 – UGLY BABY

January 2016

Natural Progression

August 2014

As they settle into the community, the Hales run into a problem:
They fell in love with natural wine back in New York, so they
decide to go into retail instead. They convince their favorite importers (SelectioNaturel, Louis/Dressner) to sell them bottles previously unavailable in the state. The Hales open their wine shop, Maine & Loire.

—Ben jackson, CHEF

Photographs by

PORTLAND, ME

September 2015

Herb-Rubbed Cast-Iron Chicken with Pan Sauce

“I spend a lot of time staring at produce in the walk-in. One time,
I ordered way too much cabbage
and spent all morning pacing, trying
to figure out how to make it go away. So, I made this fresh salad out of it, with vinegars I made myself from leftover wine, which isn’t hard to pull off and just superior as a product.”

“I love lamb shawarma, and
this eggplant dish is inspired by it, flavor-wise. We hard-roast the eggplant to replicate the char on the outside of the meat, and the cashew butter is the ‘white sauce.’”

5 – NYUM BAI

HOT TEN

7 – CHE FICO

3 – UGLY BABY

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

5 – NYUM BAI

1 – NONESUCH

Reported by

Checking the crowd-fave chicken

GET THE RECIPE

Alexis as a server and Ben as chef.

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

7 – CHE FICO

2018

Flowers greet you at Drifters Wife.

There’s no better place on the planet to drink natural wine
than right here. How did Brooklyn transplants Orenda and Peter Hale go from running a little bottle shop to transforming their
town, glass by glass and dish by dish?

They move the wine racks to the back of the shop and open Drifters
Wife up front

GET THE RECIPE

Reynard, Diner, Marlow
& Sons

DRIFTERS WIFE

—Ben jackson, CHEF

January 2015

“Adding a weight [on top of the bird] renders more fat and produces an extremely crisp skin. People have been cooking chicken this way forever, so
it’s not as if I’m doing anything new.
I use what I have [to weigh it down], and that just so happens to be a beautiful rock I found while snorkeling off the Maine coast.”

Funky, pricier natural wines prove to be
a hard sell in Portland. So the Hales figure the only way to get locals into it is by popping open the bottles to try with a few snacks.
, installing an eight-seat counter, a few tables, and a tiny kitchen outfitted with two induction burners, an electric oven, and a lowboy fridge. The Hales call Ben Jackson, a former sous-chef at Reynard, and his wife, Alexis, a front-of-house veteran, with a proposition: “Move to Portland and work for us.”

February 2018

—Ben jackson, CHEF

There are no natural wine shops in Portland!

After working at New York City restaurants
—including and —for a decade, Orenda and Peter Hale decide to get out of town. They dream of doing their own thing: a little café. On a whim they head to Portland, Maine, new and unfamiliar turf for both of them.

After one whirlwind visit the Jacksons fall
in love with Portland and soon start working at Drifters Wife, with

Allison Anderson, director of experience and hospitality,
and Holmes are both alums of Frasca Food and Wine
in Boulder. They moved to Denver to work on Call after
meeting entrepreneur and Call partner Craig Lieberman,
who also owns the cracker company 34 Degrees Crisps.

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

Sourdough Æbelskivers

HOT TEN

Avocado and Tomato Sandwich

This carrot salad with dandelion greens and tahini is just one of the many little dishes you can order à la carte or as part of a four-item tray.

10 – CALL

Smoked
Salmon Tartine

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

6 – NIMBLEFISH

4 – FREEDMAN’S

Walk up to the counter
at Call and you’ll be arrested by the array of fresh colorful salads—like this version with farro, quinoa, cauliflower, greens, avocado-yogurt purée, and dukkah.

2 – MAYDAN

HOT TEN

CALL

DENVER

SNACK ALL DAY

4 – FREEDMAN’S

2 – MAYDAN

6 – NIMBLEFISH

Each day fresh-baked loaves line what chef Duncan Holmes calls the "bread wall" by the counter. Pretzel rolls, English muffins, sourdough boules, and brioche buns are among the loaves used for Call’s rotating selection of sandwiches.

Christina chaey

At Call, Holmes, Anderson, and Lieberman are going for the all-day café vibe popularized by restaurants such as Gjusta and Rose Cafe in Venice, California.

10 – CALL

8 – YUME GA ARUKARA

Power Salad

Roasted Carrot Salad with Peas

The best meal of all time is the accidental long,
boozy lunch. And the best new place to have it
is at this all-day hang, with its crimson-red spritzes
and endless selection of snacky things.
Don’t be surprised if you arrive at 10 a.m.
and are still there at 2 p.m.

These fried Danish
treats (here with jam and ricotta) are like a cross between a pancake and a doughnut hole and have been a fixture on the menu since Call opened.

2018

The kitchen puts out prepared sandwiches daily starting at 10:30 a.m. for customers who prefer to take food to go. There's always a vegetarian option (like this one) as well as a meat sandwich.

9 – DRIFTERS WIFE

HANG TIME

7 – CHE FICO

Just a few dishes you might find one afternoon at Call

5 – NYUM BAI

Chef Duncan Holmes fills the glass display case with a daily selection of tartines on house-made bread, often seeded rye or sourdough. Think smoked salmon with curried onions and roasted garlic (pictured) or grapefruit and feta with blackberry jam.